Steve Dudley will present the Department of Biological Science seminar with a talk entitled, " #TheTweetingBird: Using #socialmedia to support your author community and drive their research articles' @Altmetric Attention Scores."

The Altmetric Attention Score of a research article is a metric for our digital and social media age. This article-level metric measures the online attention, not scientific quality, of a research article. Altmetrics were launched mainstream by most journal publishers in 2014. The BOU was already using social media to promote our journal articles in IBIS, and now we had a means to measure the impact of our science communication (scicomm). 

Getting research talked about is not only good for science, but also has benefits for authors, the journals and publishing societies. On the introduction of altmetrics in 2014, it occurred to the me that in order for the ornithology community to get behind this new metric, it required independent, within-sector education to gain traction, which the BOU could provide. 

Three years on, and working with an increasing number of partners, the ornithology community’s understanding of altmetrics has greatly improved. This has led to an increasing number of researchers taking up social media, and blogging, to help drive the Altmetric Attention Score of their own research articles. 

From a study of over 2,500 articles from 10 ornithology journals, I will illustrate how authors, institutes and publishing societies can help drive the Altmetric Attention Score of their own research articles. This will include authors driving their own altmetrics, the highest scoring altmetric paper in IBIS, and a UK institute who used the Altmetric Attention Scores of their staffs’ research articles as a means to measure, and drive, the outreach of their own research output. Finally, I will demonstrate a convincing positive correlation between the Altmetric Attention Score and future scholarly citations within ornithology, suggesting that social media activity can either drive or pre-empt traditional academic citations.